Voices of Boston

Language Diversity, Ideologies, and Politics in the Sociolinguistic Landscape

Poster presented at NWAV52, November 7-9, 2024, Miami, FL

Poster design by Jacqueline S. Campo, Elham Khosravian, Chisom Nlebedum, and Jennifer Sclafani.

Aerial photos of Boston by Jasen Sousa.

Authors (from left to right): Wonguk Cho, Elham Khosravian, Jasen Sousa, (x), Jennifer Sclafani, Chisom Nlebedum, Ibrahim Abuserriah, (x), (x), (x), Naomi Yamakawa.

Stay tuned and check back here for the VOICES OF BOSTON website, coming in Spring 2025!

Selected References

Bakhtin, M. M. (Mikhail M., & Holquist, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination four essays / by M. M. Bakhtin ; edited by Michael Holquist ; translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. University of Texas Press.

Blommaert, J. (2013). Ethnography, superdiversity and linguistic landscapes: Chronicles of complexity. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Crockett, M. (2018). Peopole before highways: Boston activists, urban planners, and a new movement for city making. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press.

Erker, D. & Otheguy, R. (2021). American myths of linguistic assimilation: A sociolinguistic rebuttal. Language in Society, 50(2), 197-233.

Fuller, J. M. (2019). Linguistic landscapes and the making of an imagined community. B. Schneider, T. Heyd, & F. von Mengeden (Eds.), The Sociolinguistic Economy of Berlin (pp. 279-298). De Gruyter Mouton.

Godley, A. J., & Reaser, J. (2018). Critical language pedagogy: Interrogating language, dialects, and power in teacher education. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Grieser, J. A. (2022). The Black side of the river: Race, language, and belonging in Washington, DC. Georgetown University Press.

Johnstone, B. (2009). Pittsburghese shirts: Commodification and the enregisterment of an urban dialect. American Speech, 84(2), 157-175.

Lou, J. J. (2016). The linguistic landscape of Chinatown: A sociolinguistic ethnography. Multilingual Matters.

Stanford, J. N. (2019). New England English: Large-scale acoustic sociophonetics and dialectology. Oxford University Press, USA.

Wolfram, W., Reaser, J., & Vaughn, C. (2008). Operationalizing linguistic gratuity: From principle to practice. Language and Linguistics Compass, 2(6), 1109-1134.

Wolfram, W., & Schilling, N. (2015). American English: Dialects and variation. John Wiley & Sons.